Chapter 11: Extraterrestrial

Kyo basked in the view from her lofty height of 5 miles. Resolved on her new quest to leave the Earth, she couldn’t help but give her home city one last look. The city whose streets she once walked now seemed as tiny little lines like some worm might make as it slithered along dirt. The entire city itself was spread out before her as a particularly large and unaesthetically-shaped bath mat or rug.

“You know, before I go, I could maybe level you real quick.”

She lifted a foot and hovered it above much of the undestroyed swaths of the city.

“No, no, that turtle-lady threw up somewhere down there. Stepping on that, even at this size, sounds gross.”

She took some big steps westward, her feet flattening much of the city nonetheless before her toes dipped the water just past the coast. The bay and it docks were crushed beneath the ball of her foot while her indomitable naked heels smothered much of the main city beneath.

“Water huh?”

She dipped her foot into the ocean, and found that it hardly came up past her toes.

“Ha! Not so deep now? Little cold though.”

She moved her other foot in, wiggling her toes which kicked up small tsunamis towards any westward coast in Japan.

The navy had of course arranged themselves to meet her well in advance. At the time of the orders though, Kyo was decidedly not 5 miles tall. The water got deeper as she moved, but never enough that it crested higher than her knees. Her legs stirred up towering waves which toppled many ships, both fishing and military, before she even reached the crafts.

The bulk of the forces were crushed as she waded through them. Even moving sluggishly in the depths, her legs were enormous enough to just obliterate the vessels on contact.

Kyo saw land, and took a big booming step on it. She had reached South Korea, and kept moving westwards. The city of Seoul was in her path, and she shot it a glance. All those tall buildings and myriad structures enticed her. With her new senses she could hear the screams of it citizens and the rolling of it military vehicles.

“No.”, she said. “Not today. I’m not being tempted to stay on this planet longer than I have to.”

She held her head high and kept walking, although she still allowed herself enjoyment as a couple of her steps just happened to trample the capital city.

She reached another patch of water, and waded through it and the occupying navy all the way to China.

Jets and such had arrived to intercept her, but she simply kept moving, swatting halfheartedly here and there. Only the fastest jets could keep up with her as, even walking, her speed was near unrivaled.

Kyo’s titanic form came on the horizon of Beijing, which she very clearly was trying to avoid looking at too much. Her desire to rampage was pretty strong, and such a dense city would be quite the treat.

The Chinese military wasn’t about to let the blue-haired behemoth trample through their country without a fight though. More jets flew her way, faster, painted a darker black. They fired missiles all the way up at her chest and neck. Great buffs of fiery hot explosions wracked her body.

Kyo started to glow gently, green this time. She felt a very familiar tingling sensation and groaned.

“What? Nuclear weapons? Really? Was no one paying attention to Tokyo this whole time or something?”

Kyo of course started to grow. Her size was on its way to doubling.

‘More size might mess up my plans. I gotta go fast.’, she thought.

Kyo broke into a running pace. Beijing had even less time to prepare themselves. The now ten-mile tall woman’s foot near covered their entire city. The canopy of her sole hung high above them, but hung briefly before it crashed down and flattened the bulk of the metropolis into dust in the wrinkles and whorls of the ped. Said dust was quickly expelled off her skin by the next step, as it seemed her body was still doing that self-cleaning thing.

Kyo did want to get off the planet, but she had a specific goal in mind, and it was far to the west. She kept running, even as more jets came her way. A quick back-hand got some of them, but others still managed to nuke her and add a mile or so of height.

“Dammit!”

Kyo kept running, hills and mountains quaking to her steps or crumbling beneath. She soon found herself needing to step over quite a few mountains, and saw an elaborate, hyper-dense city at her feet filled with smaller buildings than she expected. Their architecture wasn’t quite what she expected either.

“Wait wait this isn’t Russia is it? No.”, she said, glaring down at the city. “That’s Kathmandu, that means I’m in Nepal. I took a wrong turn south. Grrrr!”

As she grumbled, some military jets caught up with her and pelted her with a couple more nukes. She was nearing 15 miles tall now, and her toes plowed through Nepal’s capital city with her careless uncontrolled growth.

“Seriously? Argh.”

She took a look towards the sky and reoriented herself by referencing the Sun. Then, she sprinted.

The Asian continent quaked in protest to her speedy steps. Countless tons of weight and force were behind every single one of them. She passed through Kazakhstan and into Russia. As Moscow and more fell beneath her steps, even more jets came up to her, eager to disregard anything learned thus far by humanity to nuke her further, making the destruction worse as her body grew up and out.

The trend continued as she started stomping a path through more of Europe not too long after flattening much of Kiev. Warsaw, Luxembourg, Berlin, and many more notable cities, and many less notable, found themselves in her path and crushed. The countries were obviously not pleased to be trampled like dirt, and sent out the full might of their military towards Kyo which, as often, was nuclear in nature. Missiles and more fired at her, some coming from the US who decided to involve itself for whatever reason.

Each impact of a nuclear missile increased Kyo’s size further and further, and prompted her to run faster and faster to try and dodge the others. Sometimes she was successful, sometimes she was not.

“C’mon where is it. France Swiss border right? Near Geneva if my memory serves.”

Kyo had an idea to get off the planet, and it did involve growing. But, she had a specific means in mind. She wasn’t much of a scientist, but she heard of some nonsense about miniature black holes and intense radiation from a science project in Europe. She figured that, like a lot of things on the planet, would grow her. But, she figured it’d do so by a lot. Radiation seemed to be giving her a boost every time she stumbled into it, after all. What she knew about black holes was that they were intensely powerful as well.

She finally found it as she stepped onto Switzerland. While many hamlets and other settlements crushed beneath her feet, she glared down past Geneva towards her prize.

“That must be it, the Large Hadron Collider. I hope I didn’t get too big to handle it.”

Kyo, now more than 25 miles at this point, bent down one knee to try and retrieve the entire scientific complex. Said knee fell over most of Geneva, of course, flattening the lives and all other matter caught immediately beneath.

She pushed her fingers into the earth around the area of the science project. She was grateful to have senses keen enough to see the signs delineating the thing. Her pop-science knowledge, gleaned from casual web-browsing here and there, also let her know the collider itself was a bit underground.

With the collider’s tubing being at more than 10 miles in diameter, she had to settle with grabbing just part of the circular tunnel. Once in hand, she rose to her full height and the rest of it ripped out of the ground, along with all the other technology junk attached to it, and a few of the buildings stuck to chunks of land before she shook all the dirt and terrain off.

Holding the collider like an unwieldy hula-hoop, she spun it around and studied it.

“Ok, now how to get those black holes inside you. Wait a moment, are you even on?”

The collider tubing and the various pipes, wires, and tech connected to it gave off a gentle hum.

“That doesn’t sound like you’re really set to work. C’mon now.”

Kyo shook the hoop in one hand while giving the middle, more tech-coated bits of the of it a few firm slaps. The entire collider started to make a loud whirring noise. Myriad lights lit up on its surface: mostly red, warning ones. Sparks started flying off from it, and the metal groaned in her hand.

“There we go. Now, how do get to all the goodness inside.”

She tilted the miles-long hoop around, searching for some sort of hatch. She realized any on it would be far too small.

“How... ah, of course! What a stroke of genius~”

The miles tall woman wrapped her hands about a section of the tubing, and she began to tear at it. It felt flimsier than tinfoil in her mighty grip.

“Alright little hadrons, come to Kyo~”

She wasn’t exactly sure what a hadron was, and she was after those mini-black holes more than anything else. Still, she imagined they were bouncing around in there too.

The warning sirens on the collider really blared once she tore the tube apart. With one hand covering on end, she stuck the other open end of the tube right into her mouth like a thick straw. The various radioactive particles and micro-black holes traveled their path around the tube and into Kyo’s mouth. She was actively trying to suck them down, but even without that the speed of their travel would’ve sent it down her throat with ease.

By sheer, neigh-unbelievable luck, she had torn the tube at an exact time where no particles or mini-black holes could escape. That was good for the earth, which was safe from whatever consequences that would entail. They wouldn’t need that in addition to whatever consequences of Kyo’s actions were on the way.

The collider started sputtering, and shot off a last burst of sparks just as Kyo had slurped up all the radiation and black holes and whatnot. As her stomach gurgled at the strange new meal it had to process, the collider itself started bursting into flames with explosions doting it. The booms traveled along the tubing, knocking chunks of it down where they rained on the ground.

Kyo carelessly chucked forward the heated metal construct in front of her before it fully combusted. Bits of it rained down on France and caused quite a bit of a mess there.

“Alright, now to wait for all that energy to kick in. It should be more than enough to-”

Kyo’s entire body started vibrating. The tingles were overwhelming, as was the sound of a protesting stomach which had to help process oodles of radioactive particles and a slew of miniature black holes. Her body shined black briefly, then orange then green.

“Whoa, I think it’s working!!!”

Kyo shot up in size rapidly. 30 miles turned to 50, then 100 and more. Much much more. The jets that showed up to nuke her for the umpteenth time simply burst against the expanding walls of flesh heading their way as she grew.

Very soon, Kyo’s head was above the clouds and seeing the curvature of the Earth with ease. Even sooner after that, and she was hundreds of miles tall, more than ready for the next stage of her plan.

Kyo jumped, leaving the Earth’s surface behind her. She also left some rather large footprints in Europe, where her wiggling toes had carved deep impassable trenches for the denizens to deal with, and where her expanding soles had snuffed out countless cities and millions of lives.

The massive woman left Earth and entered its orbit. She hovered as big as the moon which she could now see with ease, along with with many more celestial wonders. The tingling intensified as her body seemed to figure out how to put all that energy to use. The planet was lucky she jumped with the force she did, as it was enough to provide a safe distance as started to dwarf the planet she had once walked on.

When Kyo’s growth spurt stopped, Kyo took a moment to catch her breath, and discover that she could somehow breath in space.

She looked down at the Earth before her with her green-irised eyes reflecting a tad in the ocean waters. The blue-green sphere was roughly the size of a beach-ball to her now.

“Wow, I must be, like... hundreds of miles tall now. Thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands.”

She didn’t quite know as even her own scale was hard to wrap her head around at first.

“Wait a minute, I can talk in space? I thought sound wasn’t a thing there. I guess it is. Everyone else must’ve been wrong. Ha!”

Indeed they were. Humans had never realized there could be sound in space, as astronauts had never noticed any noise there with their clunky helmets on.

Kyo also didn’t need to worry about the frigid cold of the void, or decompression or anything like that. Seems her new wacky powers took care of all that stuff which would lead to an early and disappointing end to her journey.

“Uh, hello everyone. I’m finally free, free of your stupid Earth, ha!”

People around the globe looked up, if they were on the appropriate hemisphere, to notice Kyo leaning down to taunt them. Some strands of her blue hair also fell down and forward onto Russia, further ravaging it. The strands ripped through entire towns and mountains. She thankfully noticed.

“Oh, whoops.”

And brushed it aside back towards her head.

Looking at the globe, she couldn’t help but feel a familiar urge rising as she saw it slowly spin beneath her gaze.

‘Dare I?’, she thought.

“No.”, she said. “I know if I rampage, something terrible and annoying will happen. As tempting as it is to flatten a couple continents beneath my palm or something, to feel the terrain crumble...”

Her eyes trailed down the globe towards Australia. She coyly nibbled the bottom of her lip. Her right hand started to hover over that region of the planet.

“M-maybe just a poke. A parting poke before I leave you all alone and move on to other stuff. Yeah, that should be fine.”

The people of Australia looked up to see the tip of her finger above. Their sky went from blue-ish to flesh colored in a moment, and they gazed up at miles of whirling patterns on the soft finger-pad heading their way. When it made landing everything just crumbled. Their fragility was brought to bear as mountains and buildings alike fell like sand. It was so very easy, it surprised even Kyo.

Kyo’s smile widened as she twisted her finger from side to side. She didn’t have anything against Australia in particular, she quite liked it in fact. But, it was big enough to poke and far away from anything else that she thought her act wouldn’t lead to too much unintended consequences.

She felt a warmth under her finger, and some some fire rising from the cracks her poke had made. She pulled the digit away and admired the deep molten crater.

“Mmm, that felt nice. Wait, what is.”

With her hyper senses, Kyo noticed strange things coming out of the crater. Moving things. Creatures! They were small at first, like monkeys, red-skinned or sometimes blue with spaded tails and stubby horns. Others were large, much larger. Big as small islands, they burst out of the hole she had made with spiny shells, curled horns, wings and, or, other curious traits.

Many looked up to her and cheered. She blinked a few times.

“Wait, are those...”